Booking Signing with Local Author: Rich Polk

The Saint Clare's Hospital Auxiliary of Denville and Boonton Township will host a Book Signing event with local author Rich Polk. Mr. Polk recently published Patchwork: A Collection of Short Stories, along with copies of his previously published book The Boarder on Monroe Street.

Saturday, March 2, 201310 a.m. to 2 p.m.

The Book BarnPocono Road, Denville, NJ

Article from Mountain Lakes Living (February, 2013):

Meet Your NeighborWhat happens when a man reaches the breaking point and totally abandons his life to start over again? That is the premise of Rich Polk's first novel, The Boarder on Monroe Street. Leaving his New Jersey home, Craig Miller travels to West Virginia and quickly begins to establish roots in a small, financially depressed mining town. But besides his suitcase of clothes, he carries with him strong emotions including guilt, commitment, regret and love. Battling those forces subconsciously, his intrinsic nature meanwhile is establishing new commitments and a new love in his adopted home in the Appalachians.

The surprise ending brings to light the importance of these themes in an everyday context. The author draws on a lifetime of travel and experiences to enrich this story with descriptions that more than one reviewer has described as similar to watching a movie.

A Mountain Lakes resident, Polk has written for Mountain Lakes Living and other publications. Before he had completed editing Boarder, he had started his second novel, which is now half complete. In that book, human frailties increase the danger for the book’s protagonists in a corrupt and dysfunctional America of the future. Mr. Polk also hopes to soon publish Patchwork: A Collection of Short Stories in the next few months.

“These are slender but resonant stories, carefully constructed and often luminously written. The characters and situations continue to live on in the reader's mind when the story arc has been completed.

“Whether Rich is giving us a man trudging along the railroad tracks in a raw Polish winter in WW2, or drawing on his own experiences of a real 'stakeout,' he is convincing and insightful. He has a keen sense for a 'good story' and a growing mastery of form and language to make that one shot count.

“With the exception of his moving story 'Victor,' his focus is not the momentous, the extraordinary, or the cosmic, but the everyday – the everyday miracles of courage, falling in love, doing the right thing – or even, with growing reluctance, doing the wrong thing,”